We were coming down through cloud — gray, smoky stuff so thick it seemed motionless. I stood up to stretch my legs and the curtain of cloud blinked, appeared for a moment like mountains — except that they were upside down — then whisked away, so that the air opened vastly on each side. There it was. I could see England — gray, and brown, and green — finished off neatly by the beaded strip of white cliffs. The fat man sleeping behind his cigar blocked one of the five windows with his head. Sitting down again and looking the other way — to the south — I could see the French coast, the sixty-mile sweep of the bay from Le Havre to Cherbourg. And straight down there, much nearer, was a shield of shining water.
I was glad and I knew why. Even though you quarrel with a relative, you can be glad to see him, because, through the years, he has become part of your life. This dangerous water was part of mine. I was home already. I could see what the charts had told me before, though I never really believed them on the deck of a boat. The coast of France hunched toward England opposite Dover, fell away to the south and west, then punched out the Cherbourg peninsula with its rocks and cliffs like a left hook, confining the water in a vast pool. It could be thought of as a lake. And there it was — or most of it, anyway — the heart of the English Channel. Is there any stretch of water that has been so fought and traded over, so beset with the complexities of tides and sudden storms and fog? Is there any water that can be so vast and dangerous to sail in a small boat, yet seem so small and placid when you fly across it?
Suddenly I wanted to look at my relative. I felt like a small boy in a shunting yard or among circus tents. I wanted to peer, learn and identify. I got up again and shook my head at the stewardess. ‘No thanks. I’m just looking.’
How sophisticated the other travelers were! They gave me faint smiles or ignored me. I tiptoed foolishly, leaned and peered. What a clown they must have thought me, getting so excited over a stretch of water not much wider than the mouth of a big river. I might have explained, but of course that would never have done. After all, I am English. Mustn’t speak. So I said the words with a voice inside my head, silently.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, forgive me. But I am flying for the first time over — over what? I am flying over my life.’
Just down there, behind that island — under your pretty nose, madam — I saw seven (or was it eleven?) thousand ships at anchor. They filled thirty miles of anchorage. From the air, I suppose, they would have seemed separate ships. But down there, you couldn’t see water — just gray paint and a wooded hill or two. We sailed south across this ‘lake’ to where the peninsula, with Cherbourg at its tip, was now sliding out of sight. Seen from up here, we must have seemed to ooze, the thousands of us, like a stream of dark oil. So simple a business it looked on the diagram! But the diagram did not show the darkness, the milling craft, the rising wind. Back there, in that sparkling piece of sea under the tail, I left my first lieutenant on watch and turned in, to be fresh for D-Day. He lost the whole invasion — simply mislaid it and then confessed when I came up on the bridge at two o’clock in the morning that he hadn’t liked to go any faster because it was so dark.
Indeed the Channel was big that night, oceanic, and covered with a swarm of red stars from planes and gliders moving south. I found that we were miles west of our position. So we turned southeast and steamed at full speed all night over jet black waves that were showered with sparks of phosphorescence and possibly loaded with mines.
I stood there all night catching up and felt history in my hands as hard and heavy as a brick. I was frightened — not immediately of the mines we might set off at any moment, nor of the batteries ashore, nor the thousands of enemy aircraft we had been promised. I was frightened, of all things, of being late and jeered at. I find him funny now, that young man with the naval profile and the greening badge on his cap.
Yes, the Channel was wide that night. From Southampton Water to Gold Beach off Normandy was a stellar distance. But the morning and the coast together were a marvel I still cannot believe I saw. All that vanishing curve there, tucked away between the Cherbourg Peninsula and the mouth of the Seine was growing a forest of black trees hundreds of feet high. The rockets on our left fired first and one of our own planes dived straight into the first salvo.
There was the fatal geometry of his curve and the trajectory of the rockets; he touched one just as it was turning to come down. There was a bright smile of flame, the flash of a grin five thousand feet up. Then the two sides of the smile drooped away, fell, slid slowly and sadly down the sky as if it wasn’t such a joke after all.
That’s a dull stretch of coast from seaward. It’s sixty miles of beach and low cliff with undistinguished harbors where you have to go through a lock if you want to be safe from the sea. Until it was discovered that a beach was the right place to sit in summer, no one lived there except fishermen and their women and children who picked over the rocks and eked out an existence on sea food. It was the tail end, the unwanted hedge that bounded rich French farmland. Now the seashore is an asset, but the towns and villages there are new and don’t blend with their environment. If you sail from Cherbourg to Le Havre, you see them shining one after the other. You can pick out rich Deauville by the white yachts lying off the shore.
This water is the heart of the Channel. It widens all the way down from Dover until the Cherbourg Peninsula gathers it like a sleeve. The French call it the Sleeve; and we, always prone to regard a bit of water as our own property, call it the English Channel. Up here, peering from side to side and down I can nearly see the Sleeve shape. The gathered part is behind us, a sixty-mile-wide entrance to the Channel. I was once three days trying to cross that stretch in my boat and barely managed to. Away to the east, not seen, implied only by the trend of the two shores, is Dover Strait, the shoulder of the shirt — the bottleneck. From those cliffs behind Dover I had my first sight of France when I was a child.
I saw a gray-green whale lying on the horizon, full of mystery — a patch of land that stretched all the way through the Urals, through China to the Pacific. So unreal was my picture of the world that I only glanced at the whale and was much more interested in the procession of ships making their slow way east and west.
There, where the ground was firm under my feet, where the rules were known, was home — England, the real world. Why, out there on the horizon they could not speak English, they had a president and not a king, they even drove on the wrong side of the road. That smudgy coastline might have been a picture on the wall.
Emotionally and physically, the English do not cross the Channel without great preparation. They cross it more easily and in greater numbers than they did when I was a child; but there is still a hard core of reserve. When young and untraveled, the English do not believe in the continent at all. It is a sort of fairy tale. The twenty-odd miles of water are just sufficiently difficult, require just enough enterprise and effort, to make travel in our own island the easy, obvious thing. When real storms blow up in the narrows and the ferry boats cannot run we do not think of ourselves as cut off from the French (who can still go all the way to Peking or the Cape of Good Hope by land if they choose). What is isolated is not England — it is Europe and Asia and India and Africa. The waters of the Channel have run for too many years in our blood.
To do them justice, the ferry services are interrupted very seldom. There are always plenty of people who travel for business or health or pleasure, so a highly specialized sea trade has grown up to serve them in the narrowest part of the Sleeve — the Straits of Dover.
Think of the problem.
The ferry has to be a sea-going ship, equipped to meet everything from the sudden storms of October to the deadly, month-long gales of midwinter. It may leave Dover in sunshine and ten minutes later be deep in fog. And then the tides in the Channel are never quite predictable. One wave rushes right round the north of the British Isles and comes down the North Sea while another sweeps up the English Channel. They meet in the narrows and ought to form a line of still water — the ‘Null Point’ — which should join Rye on the English coast to Boulogne on the French. But winds hold these tides back or speed them up. So the ‘Null Point’ flickers unpredictably. Where the tides meet, they nag and quarrel; and any wind stronger than a breeze stirs this welter into a patternless movement which is ideal for mal de mer.
On top of this, the twenty miles of the narrows is perhaps the world’s worst water-borne traffic-jam. Every two minutes, day and night, a cargo ship passes between the cliffs of Dover and Cape Gris-Nez. Approach the narrows from any direction and you find yourself in a procession of ships. They come up the French coast from Le Havre, up the center of the Channel from the Atlantic, up the English coast from Southampton, down the North Sea from Hull and Newcastle, across it from the Baltic. Vessels from Holland and Germany pick their way past the shallows off the Scheldt and come round past Cape Gris-Nez. All these processions of traffic merge until, in the narrows, they become a crowd. Stir into this crowd the fishing boats, pleasure boats and naval craft and you can understand why disaster always threatens in the narrows. It happens every now and then, when the visibility is bad. A boat simply disappears. One was a boatload of Sea Scouts, an experienced crew with an experienced officer in charge. Last year a large ketch vanished — no one knows how, though you may guess. Somewhere in the hooting and whining gloom a high, steel bow cracked open and cut down a wooden box, unseeing, unknowing, and passed on.
It is owing to human technique and virtuosity that — touch wood — the ferries avoid disaster. They cross the streams of traffic at right angles sometimes in fog so thick that a captain cannot see the bow of his own ship, feeling their way with the delicate assurance of a blind man reading braille. Radar helps them now, but radar can be a danger too; junior officers sometimes misinterpret what shows on the radar screen. In any case, captains prefer to use their own eyes after all.
Rules For the Prevention of Collision at Sea are complex and cater mostly for the relative movement of only two vessels. But in the narrows there are always more than two. Each captain is constantly solving complex problems in co-ordinate geometry with data partly guessed at, and always facing the possibility of a sudden emergency arising out of simple human error. In fog, the need for skill is multiplied many times. Yet for three hundred and sixty-five days in the year this service, this bridge of technique and artistry, is maintained with only the rarest breaks for bad weather. You can go to sleep in a train in Victoria Station, London, and your carriage will be loaded quietly aboard at Dover and fastened down with steel bolts as thick as your wrist. You will wake up in France, having been carried, sleeping, across the most dangerous straits in the civilized world, in the hands of one man.
How wise we were, I thought, looking out of the round window and trying to decide how far Dover was over the horizon — how wise we were not to invade Hitler’s Reich by way of the narrows! He was no sailor, that man, or he would have known we should never have made it. Far better to try further west where the wide waters look more dangerous to the ignorant eye, but are rhythmical and more predictable and calmer. On the chart, what looks the shortest distance would have been the longest way home.
But then, we people who use the Channel know that we do so on sufferance; we have always understood that there are natural hazards hereabouts which are beyond man’s control. If we had sailed out for the narrows, my first lieutenant could have put us slap on the Goodwin Sands. Only last summer I sailed past them gingerly in my old boat and they looked quiet enough. But they are only a mile or two off course for Calais and throughout history they have taken a constant toll of lives and ships. Even last summer, with the air full of sputniks, I saw some of the broken wrecks and knew they were recent because no ship that goes aground there stays visible for long.
The shoals are ten miles wide, center of a slow circling movement of water which the main tide keeps in motion as one great wheel turns another. The Goodwins do not merely wreck ships; they chew them up and then swallow them. The moving stones act like a system of files, mincers, teeth. The Goodwins give back nothing. Yes, we were right to invade where we did.
And yet even that wider part of the Sleeve has its perils. Last winter I drove down to the coast and out along the island to the tip of Portland Bill to watch a storm in action. I stood in the lee of a rock and an old man from the huddle of buildings by the lighthouse joined me. We watched what was left of daylight drain away while the wheeling spokes of the light burst out over the sea and swung warningly across the Race.
All the water in the Sleeve has to come past this narrower part between Cherbourg and Portland Bill, yet here there is a cliff under water. On the French side the cliff is the face of a deep gouge reaching from the Cherbourg Peninsula southwest among the Channel Islands. You can be swept down there at twelve or thirteen miles an hour to a pin-cushion of rocks where the tide rises and falls more than forty feet. But on the English side, the underwater cliff stretched away from my feet that night and the outgoing tide was running against a southwest gale. In the gathering darkness phantom lighthouses a hundred feet high rose and fell. I glimpsed for an instant a curtain of water and spray that had the shape and size of a full-rigged ship. Waves rose up and ran together and threw up a forest of smoky spindrift. This was no local spectacle, a disturbance like the commotion from a salvo of heavy shells. This stretched to the horizon. All the battleships that have ever been built would exhaust their magazines to simulate one moment of that wild abandon. We crouched in the lee of the rock, numbed. We watched the gale comb mist from the tormented water and drag it away like smoke from a burning city; and minute by minute, symbol of man’s knowledge and impotence, the lighthouse sent a succession of spokes of light that swung, probed the turmoil and then flinched away as if appalled by what they saw.
Numbed and perhaps intimidated, we turned our backs on that fierce spectacle and comforted ourselves by talking. The old man had been a sailor. He had worked in the ships I remember seeing as a child, the coasting ships of small and forgotten trade routes. He had taken coal from South Wales to Newquay on the north coast of Cornwall. One of his last trips had been with china clay from Fowey to the Medway in Kent. But he was glad now to be working for Trinity House, looking after the lights on dry land. Being a sailor, at least in those days, was no sort of life. I confessed with a sort of shame that I had sailed all my life for enjoyment.
‘In winter? In this sort of weather?’
No. Of course not.
A wall of difference appeared between us. He said nothing for a while, but then he began to talk and I found he was leading up to Chesil Bank. Did I know Chesil Bank?
I stalled. In fact I know Chesil Bank well. I had even helped in some rather amateurish geological investigations that had been done there. For Chesil Bank is one of the geological mysteries of the world. It is a bank of gravel, a few hundred yards wide, that stretches west from Portland, and it is slowly moving. It has come up from the bottom of the channel and sealed off more than ten miles of coast from Portland almost to Jane Austen’s Lyme Regis. Between the bank and the shore are salt marshes full of wild birds, meres — shallow pools — lapping green fields and medieval villages stranded like ships. Here is Abbotsbury, with tilted houses of gray, carved stone. Here are the royal swans, beautiful, but so many as to be a pest. The bank itself is the mystery. Some juggling trick of the tides has ordained that the bank shall be a pebble-sorting mechanism which works as perfectly as an electronic sorter. At one end are boulders; and then for ten miles the pebbles are graded down in size to tiny jewel-like fragments of rounded, colored stone. If you went on the bank in fog you could tell pretty well where you were by the size of the pebbles. But to seamen this attractive exhibition is known as the Graveyard of Ships. The bank descends steeply into forty or fifty feet of water. When the prevailing wind brings in the waves they do not become lines of tumbling surf. They strike with the momentum of solid, unbroken water — with the explosive force of great guns. Sailing ships coming up the Channel had only to be a mile or two off in their estimated position to find themselves on the wrong side of Portland Bill where the bank waits. The old man talked of all this, and suddenly I realized he was telling me my favorite Channel story.
It is an old story and true, but he told it as if he had been there. He had heard it from a messmate who had heard it from a pilot who had heard it from….
So the story lost nothing in the telling. It happened during one of the great storms of the nineteenth century. There was a small schooner on the run from Falmouth to Southampton. She met stiffer weather than she bargained for, stood out into the Channel for an offing and lost herself. The wind increased, beyond a gale, beyond a storm, became more or less a hurricane. At last there was nothing to do but run before it. They had only the haziest notion of where they were, thought that with luck they might be east of Portland Bill and manage to get into shelter behind the Island. A boy who climbed the foremast thought with youthful optimism that he caught a glimpse of the Isle of Wight, but the captain knew better. They drove on before the southwest gale, reduced to a state of indifference which was disturbed only by a faint trace of hope. There are a few holes in the coast — the narrow slit of Weymouth, the lee of Portland, risky Christchurch Harbor, the mouth of Poole Harbor choked with sand. They might hit one. Things as rare have happened. But if they chanced on safety they would be there and see there at about the same time, for the storm was whipping the tops off the waves and spreading a thick curtain before them. Safety or death would be little but a glimpse and immediately after, the event. Yet when they saw something it was from some distance — the width of seven waves. They were aware first of a whiter whiteness stretching across their bows as if the sun were trying to break through in the wrong place. But then they saw that the whiteness was the fury of a wave bursting on Chesil Bank which they were about to strike fairly in the middle.
Of course, there was nothing to be done. In seconds they would crash against the face of the bank where the ship would shatter like glass. This was not shipwreck — the men would not live long enough to drown — this was summary execution. They had no time to think, only time to feel a blind and animal panic that froze them to the ropes while six waves exploded and the seventh lifted and poised the ship, ready to throw her like a stone.
The explosion never came. They were high up in the wind and spray — flying, it seemed — for one ridiculous moment. The wave was all about them, was carrying them — was putting them down — was putting them down gently, was sinking, was ebbing away.
They were afloat in the mere on the sheltered side of the bank, and ducks were swimming away from them indignantly. The stern of the schooner rested against a grassy bank. In fact, they could step ashore. A few yards away cows were standing under trees and further on there were two cottages….
But already we were over England. I removed myself from memories of Portland and Chesil, gave up my defiant peering through this window and that. The trouble was, I thought, the memories were too crowded. I could not think of the Channel as a whole, or even this eastern part of it. One day I should write a book; and find, no doubt, that even one book was too little for a whole history, a whole world. Behind me, the lake, the pool of water from Cherbourg to Calais, from Portland to Dover, was swinging up to the horizon. I fumbled my way back to my seat. I remembered how the pool was fringed with the ruins of defensive works, from rusting pockets of barbed wire, back through Martello Towers and forts and castles, back to the earthworks of Bronze Age invaders. For thousands of years we have sailed these waters and wantonly added the perils of war to them until the bed of the Channel is littered thick with every kind of wreck.
And I? I have snatched my pleasure from the Channel, knowing full well that every second story about her is someone’s tragedy. Perhaps that is why I never see in her the cheerful blueness that you sometimes find in open waters. At best, the Sleeve in fine weather shows an opalescence, a semi-precious beauty which has, like the gem, an overtone of menace and bad luck.
And now, in a few years, we may have a tunnel under those waters. I salute the idea. No longer will Europe and China and India be isolated in bad weather. Africa can breathe again. But as I fastened my safety belt I was still thinking of the semiprecious opal which should never be used in an engagement ring. Will those waters allow us to get away with it, to build and maintain a tunnel? Or is there still a trick or two stowed away up that ancient and capacious Sleeve?